by James Cook
*****
We couldn’t follow 281 forever, so we cut toward Highway 16 and used any flat, wide, unobstructed stretch of ground we could find to take us north until we were within four miles of Interstate 20.
Along the way, we found a gas station with diesel tanks that had not been looted, allowing us to refuel and restock our gerry cans and fuel barrels as well as supplement our meager provisions. Near where we stopped, a side road led into a heavily wooded region away from any significantly populated areas. According to the map, there was a large natural pond nearby. Morgan’s senior sergeant ordered a HEMTT and a few Humvees to break off and get to work purifying as much of that water as they could. Morgan himself radioed us to wait for him and approached our position in his command vehicle.
“Got a mission for you,” he said as he pulled alongside.
“Let me guess,” Blake called back. “Recon I-20, see what we’re up against.”
“You are a man of impeccable logic.”
Dad exchanged a look with his old friend, then said, “Can do. But we’ll need to refuel first.”
Morgan motioned to his driver. “Not a problem.”
After topping off the tanks, we headed north toward the interstate. The section of highway we approached lay in the middle of a steep, broad V that had once been a hill. There were many such places along the interstate where the highway builders had blasted through the landscape in order to keep the road nice and straight. The resulting formation allowed us to park the vehicles at the base of the hill and approach the summit on foot, staying low to avoid detection. At the top we fanned out at ten-meter intervals along the hillside and surveyed the scene through our optics.
By that point, I thought I had seen some bad things. Crossing the bridge over I-35 that flaming evening had been something out of a fevered nightmare. The City of Houston in flames in the dark red distance was a sight that would haunt me for years. The 281/290 junction had been a blood-soaked cluster-fuck of epic proportions. But when I looked down that hillside at Interstate 20, for the second time in my life, I felt a sinking, bowel-constricting panic that I had died and my soul had been damned for all eternity.
It would have taken me years to count the infected. There were cars piled on top of cars on top of even more cars. Tractor-trailers and buses and RVs and every other vehicle imaginable lay overturned and crashed and burned down to skeletal husks. The stench of corpses was a living, crawling thing that reached down my throat and closed a hand around my windpipe. Dead bodies lay everywhere, some still in their vehicles, some on top of them, some on the side of the road, still others crawling, too damaged from the infected who consumed them to mount much mobility.
Organs, limbs and bloody streaks covered every surface, stained the ground red, splattered against windshields, and lay rotting in the ditches on the side of the road. I scanned left and saw a Blackhawk helicopter crashed in the middle of traffic, tail rotor pointing skyward, the skeletal visage of the pilot slumped against his restraints. I scanned to the right and saw a vintage convertible with the top down, the driver in pieces on the ground nearby, and, to my horror, a baby seat in the back. For a moment, the baby seat looked empty, then I realized the padding was beige under the red, and that lump at the bottom was-
NO!
I dropped my rifle, scrambled back down the slope, and got as far away as I could before I was violently, gut-wrenchingly sick. I heaved up everything inside me and kept going, dry-heaving, ribs cramping, abdomen trying to tear itself apart.
Finally, the seizures subsided and I managed to crawl away from my own bile before I collapsed and lay on my side, gasping for breath. A few moments later, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Hey,” Blake’s voice said. “I’d ask if you’re okay, but I think the answer is pretty obvious.”
“Can’t …” was all I could manage to croak out.
“Come on, Caleb. It’s not safe here. Let’s go back to the Humvee. We’ll wait there for the others.”
I followed him, barely conscious of where I was going, dimly accepting my rifle and slinging it over my shoulder. Blake helped me into the passenger’s seat, then climbed in, cranked the engine, and turned the AC to its highest setting. After a few minutes, the cold air blowing in my face started to make me feel better.
“Sorry about that,” I said, feeling a flush come up my neck.
Blake shook his head. “Don’t be. If I’d stayed a few more seconds, I wouldn’t have been in much better shape.”
“That makes me feel a little better.”
“Man, I’ve seen some things, but that …”
“Yeah. No shit.”
“How the hell we gonna get past that?”
“I’m sure the good captain will think of something.”
We waited with no further conversation until Dad, Mike, and the two combat engineers came back down the hillside. On the way down, one of the soldiers hesitated, turned to the side, and heaved his guts behind a pine tree. The others waited, faces stoic, until he had mastered himself and started on his way again.
Back in his vehicle, Dad calmly and in detail explained the situation on the interstate. Morgan told him to stand by, presumably to confer with his staff, then came back on the radio and requested we return to the convoy.
“Roger that,” my father said. “En route. Recon one out.”
*****
The first time you see heavy artillery fire on a target at close range, you never forget it.
Like the others in the convoy, I waited at a good safe distance for the fireworks to start. Morgan’s men had scouted the various access roads until they found a flat approach on a narrow two-lane. The Abrams and two Howitzers took point, the Bradleys backing them up, APCs waiting the wings in case infantry support was needed during the crossing.
I sat in a Humvee with Blake and Sophia at the rear of the column. My father, Lauren, and Lance were in front of us. Tyrel and Lola waited behind, Mike bringing up the rear in his truck. Dad had loaned his Ram to a trio of pregnant women from the RV encampment so they could escape the discomfort of the deuce-and-a-half they had been riding in.
Travis had observed the transaction, and afterward offered Dad a handshake and a tight-lipped thanks. He did not look in my direction.
Later, we sat on the road eyeing the woodlands around us for signs of infected and waited. There was just enough bend in the road I could see the armor as they rolled forward, stopped about two-hundred yards from the teeming, screeching mass of infected frothing through the twisted metal obstructing the interstate, spread out, rolled to a stop, and aimed their guns.
The radio crackled to life. “All stations stand by. Engaging in three, two, one …”
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM
The projectiles traveled so fast there was no distinguishable difference between the thunder of shots and the detonation of high explosives. When the smoke cleared, there was a massive dent in the derelicts blocking our path, cars blown on top of other cars in twisted, broken heaps. But the way was not clear. With surprising speed, the crews reloaded, passed along another warning, and then fired in tandem.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM
The shells pushed the wreckage back further, but not enough to allow the convoy to cross. So the crews kept at it, firing, issuing warnings, and firing again. It took eleven rounds of three-gun bombardment before they finally blasted a lane wide enough to allow the convoy to pass.
The ordnance obliterated the infected closest to the target area, while those standing farther away were either disabled or sent hurtling through the air. Ghouls poured into the gap from all directions, making it obvious we would have to move quickly to get clear.
“All stations, listen up,” Morgan said over the radio. “I want Bradleys Alpha and Bravo to push up the edges of the path and make sure the heavy armor can get through. Once you’re across, Alpha face east, Bravo face west, and annihilate anything undead that comes your way. All other armored units, clear the road ahead until all non-armored vehic
les and civilian transports are safely through. Acknowledge.”
After a hasty stream of affirmatives, the first two Bradleys behind the Abrams drove around it and shoved the few remaining cars blocking the path out of the way. Once done, they crossed the highway, drove on top of clusters of tightly packed sedans, and aimed their TOW missiles, chain guns, and M-240s toward the approaching infected.
“And to think,” Blake said beside me, “there was a time people thought Bradleys were a waste of money.”
The Abrams and Howitzers crossed the cratered expanse of I-20 first, Bradleys and APCs close behind, then the HEMTTs, troop transports, Humvees, and finally us civilians in our collection of vehicles.
“Doesn’t it strike you as odd that Morgan chose to make sure his most valuable assets made it across first?” Sophia said. “It’s like we poor useless civilians were just an afterthought.”
The Humvee bounced and jumped as we floundered across the gaping holes left in the wake of the artillery shells. There were a couple of worrisome near-stalls, but finally we cleared the highway and picked up speed on the flat two-lane beyond.
“We made it across, didn’t we?” I said, turning to look at her in the back seat.
Sophia looked at me skeptically, then went back to staring out her window. Looking past her, I watched the two remaining Bradleys open up on the approaching horde with their M-240s and chain guns.
The effect was devastating.
At close range, a 25mm chain gun can penetrate tank armor. During the first Gulf War, Bradleys were credited with more kills on enemy armored vehicles than their vaunted Abrams counterparts. So needless to say, firing such a powerful weapon into a mass of necrotic flesh at less than fifty yards was nothing less than gruesomely spectacular.
The dead did not simply fall down. They did not jerk a few times and continue shambling onward as they did when hit with small arms fire. Rather, they flew apart as if someone had implanted several grenades in various points of their anatomy and set them off at the same time.
An arm flew in one direction, a leg the other, a torso disintegrated into a red and black pulp, a head flew apart like a melon blasted with a shotgun at point-blank range, limbs pinwheeled through the air to land dozens of yards away. And because the tungsten rounds were so heavy, and traveled at such high velocity, they didn’t just go through one infected, but several of them, their trajectories being thrown off only after bursting through a dozen or more corpses. There were hundreds of TINGs, PANGs, and POCKs as errant rounds hit doors and wheel hubs and engine blocks. Shrapnel and ricochets sent parts and pieces of ghouls flying in all directions.
The M-240s wreaked their own brand of havoc on the infected’s legs, blasting them to pieces the same as I had seen in the brewery parking lot back in Blanco. However, despite the hail of lead and tungsten, only the first few ranks of undead went down. The horde behind them was so large the Bradleys’ onslaught did little to halt their advance. It was like trying to hold back an avalanche with two bulldozers. Realizing they were doing nothing more than buying themselves a few extra seconds, the Bradleys reversed, turned up the road, and fled with the rest of the convoy.
By that point, Sophia had turned around to watch the show. As the Bradleys gained on the column and Morgan broadcast an order to pick up the pace, she turned and looked at me, her face pale and drawn, lips pressed tightly together.
“They just don’t stop, do they?” she said. “It doesn’t matter how many of them we kill, how many we blow up, nothing scares them. They just keep coming.”
I reached back and clasped her hand, feeling the tremor in her grasp. “We have a few advantages over them, Sophia.”
“Like what?”
“Well for one, we’re smarter than they are. We’re also faster, we can use weapons, and we can build fortifications. They can’t do any of those things.”
“But what if that changes? What if they get smarter? What if they start to remember things?”
I thought about it, and felt a cold black dread well up inside me. I let go of Sophia’s hand and sat down in my seat.
“We just have to hope that doesn’t happen.”
THIRTY-SIX
Two days later,
Near Boise City, Oklahoma
There are times when you sense trouble coming. When you see its shadow darken your sky, and your hackles go up, and you reach for the nearest sharp object.
It happens in the sleeping mind, beneath the surface, where we understand the patterns that connect the ebb and flow of life and events. Where we perceive the symmetry of probabilities and execute the intuitive calculus of expected outcomes. Within this hidden depth, we understand the mercurial animal that is human nature and how it creates its own cause and effect. If we are careful, and wary, and keep our eyes open, we can sometimes deduce the problems before they catch us. We can strike, dodge, parry, and set traps.
There are also times when trouble catches us by surprise.
*****
The slow, tedious slog up the Texas panhandle took its toll.
It takes a lot of food to fill over a hundred hungry bellies, and we were three days into a road trip that under normal circumstances should have taken no more than two. So out of necessity, anytime we saw someplace that looked uninhabited and could potentially be a source of food, we stopped and raided it. Doing so kept us fed, but also slowed our progress and cost the lives of two more soldiers.
The deaths happened at a trailer park in the middle of a small town too insignificant to have its own sign. We passed it on the highway, and after a few minutes of observation, one of Morgan’s staff sergeants deemed it abandoned. The usual crowd—Dad, Blake, Mike and I—accompanied two squads of regular infantry to the park. (Tyrel’s leg was still healing, and Lance had taken it upon himself to make sure none of the soldiers got any funny ideas about our womenfolk. Consequently, the four of us had become Morgan’s de facto outriders.)
The regular troops waited while we zipped through the trailer park and fired a few rounds in the air before returning to their position. That done, we gripped our weapons and watched for movement. Other than a slight breeze to mitigate the blazing midday sun and air rippling upward from the hot pavement, we saw nothing.
“All stations, Recon One,” Dad said into his handheld. “You are clear to move in, but take it slow. Keep your eyes peeled, and be ready to bug out on a moment’s notice.”
“Copy,” said the senior squad leader, a young staff sergeant named Alvarado. “Moving in.”
We followed the four Army Humvees at a distance, Mike manning the machine-gun turret and Dad driving. The vehicles ahead of us stopped and the soldiers piled out, weapons up, ready for trouble. Almost immediately, I saw a profound difference between the two squads.
Alvarado’s men were alert, focused, and seemed to appreciate the gravity of the situation. They moved with the skill of long practice, each man knowing his role, maintaining muzzle discipline, checking their corners, communicating in the shorthand of soldiers who knew what to expect from one another.
The other squad, led by a sergeant named Farrell, strolled casually through the cracked and pitted streets, their attitudes every bit that of the conquistador. Sergeant Farrell reminded me of every rich-kid frat-boy who ever came to Black Wolf Tactical on his father’s dime looking to inflate his fragile ego by busting caps on the close-quarters combat range.
His men glared around greedily, grins on greasy, dirty faces, gleeful avarice written in every gesture. I had the profound impression I was witnessing both the best and worst the United States Army had to offer.
“Take the west end, Farrell,” Alvarado radioed. “We’ll start from the east and meet you in the middle. Recon One, I need you on patrol.”
“Wilco,” Dad replied.
We drove slowly, bouncing and jostling over potholes and sending lizards scurrying through the brown grass lining the dead gray streets. The trailer park looked like any other trailer park from Texas to the Carolinas: shabb
y, poorly constructed rectangles squatting sullenly on tiny lots, dented mail boxes standing at vandal-abused angles, garbage lining the shallow drainage ditches, underpinning torn away to reveal collapsing insulation and cinder block mountings, sagging porches, windows covered with cheap blinds, rust marks streaking down from window-mounted air conditioners, and a general miasma of hopelessness and despair endemic of the crippling poverty so many Americans didn’t want to admit existed.
I had lived in places like this. I got to know the people who occupied them. There were generally two kinds: the renters, the people who stayed for a short while and then moved on, and then there were the owners, the permanent residents. Renters were the overwhelming majority.
Most people from both categories worked their asses off at low-paying jobs that made civilized life possible for the more fortunate. They usually did not have health insurance or retirement savings. Many of them were on government assistance of one form or another. Drug and alcohol abuse were common, but no worse than anywhere else, really.
People drove past these homes and sneered or shuddered or shook their heads in pity. Many of the people living in these places had children early in life, limiting their options and giving their kids little chance of escaping the circumstances they were born into. It was a repeating cycle, generation after generation, with the occasional success story giving some aging mother or father something be proud of, or dismiss with jealousy. Those who escaped were often not welcome when they returned to visit. Perhaps not in an overtly hostile way, but behind whispers, and looks, and a deadpan stiffness to any attempt at being polite.
